


Heartsblood

by pluperfectsunrise



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Happy Ending, M/M, Magical Theory, One-Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 13:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21339322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pluperfectsunrise/pseuds/pluperfectsunrise
Summary: There was a great deal of power in the last request a man made before dying.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Severus Snape
Comments: 30
Kudos: 365





	Heartsblood

**Author's Note:**

> A little headcanon I worked up after thinking about how Severus invented new spells.

I.

The Princes had always been a pagan lot, as a rule. When Severus was a child and when his mother had been able, she’d taught him older magics than what he would later learn at Hogwarts.

Originally, she’d explained, all magic was Dark magic. “Because all magic was about blood and the earth. Sacrifice. The wheel of life and death.”

Heart magic, she’d called it.

She didn’t mean anything maudlin or sentimental by the term. Eileen Snape knew that the heart was the bloodiest organ.

“All those spells they'll teach you in that castle only work because someone made a sacrifice, long ago,” Eileen had added. She looked stern, even though she was wearing an apron and galoshes to pick blackberries from a muddy thicket; and even though a strand of her dark hair (which was always so soft when Severus touched it) had flown into her eyes. “The incantations are passed down, but our kind always prefer to forget how they were originally imbued with power.”

_Our kind_, she’d said, because Eileen was a Pureblood and continued to think of herself that way. Severus, on the other hand, was a bit more hesitant to claim membership in the clan of wizards and witches, as he’d never yet met any but his mother. Life was made up of scavenging things to read from rubbish tips, keeping silent to avoid attracting Pa’s attention, taking extra house chores to help his mother not look so tired all the time. Where in that was there room for a castle full of ghosts and feasts? Whenever Eileen drew her wand, it was a secret that she and Severus held between them—like now, as she pulled it from her apron pocket and silently floated the dark, juicy berries from the top of the bramble down into their bucket. 

They went home and made a crumble, and it was delicious—even Pa said so. And they didn’t speak again on the topic of heart magic until a few years later, when Severus came to his mother with questions about how to invent new spells. 

He was very good at heart magic, it turned out, because he didn’t shrink from any of the sacrifices he needed to make. His greatest flaw, in his own opinion, was that sometimes he was so eager to saturate his new spells with potency that he lost sight of practical matters, like how he’d drained so much blood from the gash he’d sliced in his thigh that he would pass out in the middle of the Slytherin dorm. 

And yet, perhaps that had been worth it, because, despite the trip to the hospital wing and the need to evade the sharp questions Dumbledore asked when he visited Severus’s cot, _Sectumsempra_ worked extremely well. 

And Severus had many enemies.

~

No, Severus only had one enemy, one true and great enemy: the Dark Lord Voldemort, Tom Riddle.

After the death of Lily Evans, in the rage of impotence and self-recriminations that washed over him after Dumbledore had the gall to seem happy that the war was pausing and to demand Severus’s protection for James Potter’s son—Severus cursed himself for doing so little with the old magics to protect Lily. He ought to have cut out his eyes, or chopped off the fingers on his right hand one by one. He should have carved a pound of flesh from a place where no Healer could ever grow it back. To save Lily, he’d have given up that and more.

This was when Severus lost the taste for inventing spells, for heart magic. He had no heart anymore, he was entirely willing to believe—or if he did, it had turned to stone.

But the years passed, and the Dark Lord returned. And a man with a stone heart couldn’t do what Severus needed to do.

~

So he began to visualize his heart as a spinning mirror. One side showed Lily; the other showed his enemy, whose death he worked toward tirelessly. (No, that was a lie: Severus was tired now, all the time, more tired than his mother had been when he was a child, with her bruises and her flinching dignity, the way she’d stare past Severus sometimes, as if it didn’t matter anymore if she tried to make him feel like she loved him.) 

He trusted Albus—not necessarily because the man had given him reasons, but because Albus’s dotty machinations were his last best hope. There was no one else, and the mirror in Severus’s chest spun.

And then, there came a moment when a snake was released from a golden cage, and the Dark Lord expressed regret for the first time in Severus’s memory. And that did not matter, because Severus was staring into eyes as green as the deepest parts of the Forbidden Forest. And he realized that there was no mirror anymore, and there hadn’t been for quite some time. There was only the boy, the reckless, foolish, wretched, splendid boy.

He remembered what Albus had said about the boy's death.

_Let him live_, Severus thought as his heart’s blood spilled across the floor.

There was a great deal of power in the last request a man made before dying. Severus knew what sacrifice he was making; he knew what he was owed.

_Let Harry Potter live._

~  
~  
~

II.

The interior of the shop, empty of everything at the moment but dust and shadow, reminded Severus of nothing so much as the Shrieking Shack.

Barely suppressing his shudder, Severus flicked his wand to send the curtains winging up and allow the morning light to spill in.

Good. This sort of shop needed light.

With the quiet only broken by his own half-hums (motifs from the Baroque period, mostly, though the occasional melody from a modern song that he’d heard on the wireless sneaked its way in), Severus set to work. He dusted and scrubbed and measured and imagined—and by midmorning, he’d brought in five bookcases and secured them in place in a corner of the shop. This would work well as the Muggle Literature and Nonfiction section, he believed.

His idea to open a bookshop after the war’s end had been met with bafflement from many quarters, but Severus had had an unusually firm conviction that it was the right move. Flourish and Blotts had burned down in the months leading to the war’s end, and the owner had no plans to rebuild. 

And the students of Hogwarts needed books. Everyone needed books.

Besides which point, Severus was not inclined to spend any of this unexpected second chance at life listening to the opinions of those who only knew of or understood the facades he’d projected during the long, cruel span of the war. If he wanted to do something quiet and communal with his days like sell books, he would.

(He still didn’t know how he’d survived, of course. The superstitious child in him was afraid that it would all disappear, if he looked too closely. He’d been taking anti-venins regularly before the Battle, but they would have done nothing to counteract the fact that Nagini had ripped half of his neck away.

And yet, sometime in the very early hours of May 3rd—during a ceasefire, as he’d later come to understand—he’d awoken in the creaking darkness of the Shack with his fingers pressing down between the floorboards into the cold earth, and he’d realized that the wound in his neck had simply and miraculously closed.)

~

Severus worked to set up his bookshop in peace until noon—which was when the eternal disturber-of-his-peace arrived.

_Suddenly there came a tapping—as of one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door…_

By the time he’d taken down his wards and made his way to the shop’s locked front entrance, the disturber had given up knocking and was wheedling loudly instead. “C’mon, Severus—I took the whole afternoon off to help you set up!” he called through the wood.

Severus opened the door, and Harry Potter blinked at him, then grinned. “And I brought chips,” he added with a tone of deep self-satisfaction, holding up a paper bag with grease soaking through the side.

“And curry?” Severus wondered, crossing his arms over his chest. He didn’t like to be a cheap date.

“Yeah.” Harry held up the bag in his other hand, which proudly bore the logo of one of Severus’s favorite takeout Indian restaurants in London.

The rapture of eating curry atop chips instead of rice was something that Harry had brought to his attention. “My hero,” Severus deadpanned, stepping back to allow the boy room to enter.

When Harry kept beaming at him as he slid through the doorway, Severus suspected the brat knew that it was truer than Severus would ever let on.

~

Harry being Harry (and truly, Severus being Severus), eating curry and chips on the floor of his partially furnished shop quickly led to other activities on the floor of his partially furnished shop. It was highly difficult to ignore the sweet, tumultuous allure of the boy’s attempts to feed him chips while straddling his lap, after all.

“Did you ever think it would be like this?” Harry wondered after it was all over. "When the war ended, I mean?"

They were in Severus’s bed in his small flat behind the shop (because he was much too old, as he’d informed the boy, to enjoy the sensation of sperm leaking from his rectum while he lay on a wooden floor). Severus's skin still stung with a sense memory of trailing kisses, and Harry was resting his head on Severus’s bare shoulder with an arm slung possessively over the older man’s chest.

Unable to bear the intensity of Harry’s regard, Severus turned his face away from the young man.

“No,” he answered after a time. “I…hoped. Perhaps.” He cleared his throat. “But had I expected to survive, we would not be here.”

Harry sat up slightly, his gaze turning questioning as he pushed those ridiculous glasses up the bridge of his nose. "What do you mean?"

Severus let a long exhale slide from his chest. Watching the dust motes dance in the beams of sunlight from his bedroom window, he found himself telling Harry about heart magic for the first time. Explaining the price he’d demanded of his spilled blood while dying.

Harry was quiet for a suspiciously long time after that. “Wow,” he whispered to himself. And again, as if he was pushing all the air from his lungs with the word: "Wow."

“Care to share with the class?” Severus finally snapped, his feeling of vulnerability shortening the lifespan of his patience by a considerable margin. So far in their strange courtship, Severus had avoided directly informing Harry of the measure of his regard. The truths that had just spilled from his lips would leave little doubt on that front, though.

Harry sat up, but he kept their hands entwined—his own darker with broom callouses and bitten-down nails, Severus's pale and long-fingered and stained. 

The smile he offered felt like the first heat of sunlight on Severus’s face after a long winter.

“I was just realizing—” he started to explain. "I mean, wow, what a really good thing it was..."

His smile grew impossibly brighter.

"...that I was thinking of you when I died, too."

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading :-)


End file.
